Nobel Lecture By Toni Morrison

In Toni Morrison’s “Nobel Lecture”, which is a speech she delivered at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in 1993, reveals her opinion about the role of language among the human society. She uses a simple fable to carry her speech from beginning to end, with various discussion towards the value of language. Her speech is elegant and profound, which skillfully presents the ineffability of language. Throughout her speech, even though she does not make a clear thesis statement, she has done a great job on trigger people to discover their own language.

Morrison comes straight to the fable that young men questioned a wise but blind women whether the bird in their hands was alive or dead. The woman answered tactfully by replying “it is in your hands”,

Fable is a kind of durable literary form that can stand the test of time. It is always inspiring to use a simple fable, which concludes all the elements you need, to describe the complex, abstract and intellect concept you want to illustrate. Every character in the fable represents a type of person in the real world. The old woman, renowned, wise but blind, just like those paramount but powerful people in the society being blinded to discover the real needs of whom they speak with. They are overwhelmed by their self-flattered cleverness and experience. Moreover, they are so stingy to share experience with the young people which could help them to explore more about how should they deal with language problems. The more experienced one will lose more creativities in his growth. Most adults see language as a rigid system to express their own opinions, ignoring the animating part of it, which is a kind of ineffable magic during our childhood. Of course, you can also connect the roles, their actions and words to other reflections in the reality. As everyone’s experience is unique, the uncertainty created by the parable would lead to diversified interpretations among her audience. The reason why her speech is recognized as a masterpiece is because she let the receiver to dig into her words and contemplate on their own instead of infusing any of her thoughts into

Before telling any of her views, Morrison starts with the fable first, which is a thought-provoking prologue. Then, she points out her mind of the metaphor, which claims language as a bird. After that, she delves into the death of language, oppressive language and obfuscation by using the subject of “she” and “the old woman”. She keeps mentioning the characters in the fable, reminding the audience to think about the story through put her speech. They can freely link up different thoughts associating to the elements inside, which helps with the coherence of Morrison’s speech. With the fable, those seemingly scattered branch theses are well organized as a whole. Furthermore, the fable also leaves the audience in suspense until she switches her tone to the young visitors, who pushes back forcefully against the old woman’s ingenious answer. The image of the youngsters at the later part is a sharp contrast to the beginning, who deliberately create difficulties to the old woman. They do not accept her skillful answer and blame her for shirking the duty of preserving language as she did not fulfill her mission too. From the metamorphosis of the young man, Morrison has proved that she did a good job on stimulating the younger generation to think on their own rather than accept everything they received. Finally, the old woman set aside her prejudice and try to trust the young men.